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How Insomnia Feels

It’s hard to ignore the force of the sentences in Blake Butler’s new book, “Nothing: a Portrait of Insomnia.” Best known for his fiction, Butler is obsessed with the possibilities of syntax, and the most obvious feature of “Nothing” is a lyric and intellectual buffer overflow that results in long, often interestingly ungrammatical sentences, sometimes stretching over six pages. The most ornate of these is adorned with footnotes, a nod to David Foster Wallace, to whose memory the book is dedicated. As such the book draws attention to its own linguistic surfaces in ways that most memoirs never attempt.

Let’s backtrack for a moment. “Nothing” may or may not be a memoir, though the uncertainty isn’t in the place we expect: it’s certainly not a dressed-up novel. Instead its heart is more interestingly split between personal narration, the province of memoir, and meditation, the province of essay. Butler’s intense personal history of insomnia offers the framework for the book. Much of its first half is devoted to narrating and re-­enacting that history, interwoven with brief discussions of night, light and sleeplessness. The dependence on personal experience peaks midway through with Butler’s powerful account of living with his father, who, saddled with severe dementia, loses more and more of his self every day. Then the book’s essay heart starts to take over, leading us into more abstract, loopy territory.

I use “loopy” here in the technical sense. “Nothing” is deeply involved with looping and circular thinking, both in subject (the writing of computer code, for instance) and in style. Most of Butler’s sentences stretch beyond the hundred-word mark, kept aloft by repeating licks, linguistic tics, perforated by dashes and surprising, sometimes spectacular language. The result is a firework-studded prose we experience at very close range.

The ambition is not just to represent but to enact for the reader the breathless, spinning cycle of Butler’s own insomniac thoughts, to offer us interiority: not the description of experience but experience itself, or its best simulation. And much of that experience is one of being caught in a loop or a noose, grinding through the pathways of Butler’s brain: “Such kind of aimless mental spin — all without answer — is the kind so many nights that keeps me up long after I lay down, stuck in inevitable fixation over nothing, pointless thinking — the day again once come and gone and nothing new — each day passed the way that days do.”

The primary effect of sentences like these is a powerful immersion. Reading them, we are running “Blake Butler” as a kind of executable software program in the hardware of our heads. This is the main appeal of first-person prose, whether novel or memoir: a seemingly unmediated access to another’s brain.

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Illustration by Ted McGrath

And Butler’s brain is interesting, if frustrating. The book whirls, increasingly manic, tornadic, connecting and reconnecting memoir to meditation on sleep and sleeplessness, Derrida, David Foster Wallace, theories of nothingness and the self, the dial-up bulletin-board culture of the 1980s and early ’90s, sex, pornography, computer programming and games, the sprawling digital sludge of the Internet’s illusory everything, a (too slight) primer on insomnia and its many remedies, self-loathing, self-destruction, self-consciousness and its end, sentences and their eventual ends, self and its inevitable dissolution into sleep, madness or death.

The book’s strength is its muchness and connection, its ability to hold many things and ideas aloft, caught in the inertia of its prose, its restless nighttime wander from subject to subject. After all, nothing characterizes insomnia like that wander, a pattern all too familiar to insomniacs.

A secondary effect of the Butler sentence is exhaustion. Being Blake Butler is sometimes an extreme literary experience, often hard to take, even for a few pages, especially when its grinding is directed inward at the self and its many flaws. The long sections describing and enacting Butler’s experiences with insomnia are sometimes beautiful in their precision, but just as often these loops strand us in frustration. (Readers with a deeper insomniac experience may feel differently. I am after all but an amateur, occasional insomniac; the pros might feel a powerful kinship.)

That six-page footnoted sentence, for instance, which devolves at one point into a profane, self-hating riff before it continues on for another couple pages — well, it’s a slog. Butler knows this, and tells us so: “If all this sounds ridiculous — this flopping, this awful waddle for what could be such a simple key — that’s because it is ridiculous — it’s self-created, really, though of a self not specifically the self — instead it is the self in congregation, the sets of sets of strands of images, ideas. It comes on from no center, in a chorus with no specific off-switch or delete. It is in the muddle of my blood — a blue lining in my body that cannot be shot or taught away, but simply slipped from, somehow.” Knowing isn’t everything. Butler’s self-awareness doesn’t bail him out. (O.K., “the muddle of my blood” and “shot or taught away” are excellent, but that’s a small payoff.)

While the formal achievement of a sentence like this is impressive, it’s an empty one. Yes, Butler has successfully made me feel as he does or did. But that doesn’t lead us anywhere interesting. We’ve been there, all of us, surely. The feeling is as if we’ve lost momentum and are falling into the nothing at our circle’s center, caught in motion for its own sake. These syntactic fireworks need to terminate in an emotional or intellectual experience for the reader. As Butler puts it, “If this sounds romantic, or transcendent, it is not — or at least not mostly.” When the subject is the self and the self alone, it’s easy to get caught in recursive loops, and those sections of “Nothing” are frustrating in the way that memoir often is: self-involved, inward-seeming, unmoored from the world.

More successfully, Butler takes on another loop, that of pornographic obsession and masturbation, a self-made trap that he springs through humor and a brutal self-regard. A particularly delicious scene starts by describing his adolescent lining of his bedroom with stolen bits of porn, the clipped-out bra pages of catalogs, disembodied breasts, “sheets of tracing paper, writ with images I copied methodically from my father’s adult magazines.” When he’s displaced from his bedroom to accommodate visiting relatives, “my aunt and uncle slept in my two bunk beds underneath my full-bloomed canopy. . . . All along there was no mention.” This scene is self-lacerating, sure, but it’s funny too. It detonates something in the reader, offers us a little catharsis. It doesn’t just strand us in the BlakeButler​.exe of the past: it creates a psychological space separating past and present self, and in so doing offers us perspective, pays off in meaning.

Elsewhere Butler’s consideration of the relationship between self and nothingness is much more powerful, particularly in that section on living with his diminishing father. Here memoir works closely with essay to develop ideas, and the thinking — the essaying — feels fully engaged with world, history, idea, sentence and self. If the whole book were as elegantly coded as this section, “Nothing” would be an unstoppable tornado.

NOTHING

A Portrait of Insomnia

By Blake Butler

326 pp. Harper Perennial. Paper, $14.99.

Ander Monson’s latest books are “The Available World: Poems” and “Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir.”

A version of this review appears in print on December 25, 2011, on page BR16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Up All Night. Today's Paper|Subscribe